Keyona Bostick, Ph.D. didn’t have time for cancer.
So, when the assistant vice chancellor of HR operations at North Carolina A&T State University was diagnosed with multiple myeloma – a blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow – she told Dr. Kathleen Elliott, a hematologist with Novant Health Cancer Institute - Forsyth, that she didn’t plan to treat it.
That was April 2023. Though only 50 at the time, Bostick felt she’d lived a long, happy life and that – as she said – “I’m a true believer in God. Everybody has a birth day, and everybody has a death day. If this was my time, then it was my time.”
“I wasn’t sad,” she said. “I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t even shocked. My faith is strong, and I just accepted this as part of my journey. I mostly felt … aggravation. I don’t like being inconvenienced, and cancer was a major inconvenience.”
Bostick developed a hard shell at a young age. She lost her mother and her brother when she was only 12. “I had to create this strong armor around me to move forward with life,” she said.
“My father was diagnosed with cancer years ago,” she added. “And one of my close childhood friends has had cancer, and I saw what chemotherapy and radiation did to them. I told Dr. Elliott I didn’t want to change my lifestyle. Plus, I work in Greensboro, and the cancer center is in Winston-Salem. I didn’t want to drive back and forth.”
Specialized care for your cancer diagnosis.
Listen without judgment
Elliott listened and took Bostick’s concerns seriously.
“I was taken aback to hear someone fairly young and healthy say she didn’t want treatment,” she recalled. “Blood cancers are typically very treatable. I asked her to take some time to think about it, talk it over with family and friends before she made her decision.”
Bostick did appreciate Elliott’s thorough detailing of the treatment plan. “And one thing that helped me come around is how compassionate she was about my feelings. She wasn’t forceful. She allowed this to be my decision, and she gave me peace of mind. I probably asked her 1,000 questions. She answered every one of them to my satisfaction.”
Being an academic, Bostick did her research, consulted her nurse friends, talked to someone who’s been successfully treated for multiple myeloma. When she returned a week later, Bostick was ready to say, “Sign me up. I'm doing it.”
Something else that helped push Bostick toward saying yes to treatment: Novant Health was opening a new cancer center in Greensboro. She could receive her chemotherapy – four rounds of it – just four miles from her office. (For the first year the center was open, Elliott divided her time between Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Since she’s now practicing in Winston-Salem and Thomasville, another doctor – hematologist Dr. Franklin Chen – is now in the Greensboro clinic.)
“I considered that my sign from God,” Bostick said about the new center. “Everything started falling in line. I could get to my appointments from my office in less than eight minutes. And they made my appointments for the time of day I requested. I mean, I ran out of excuses. They made everything so convenient.”
Bostick became one of the first patients to receive chemotherapy at the Novant Health Cancer Institute Greensboro office.
“I will not let this interrupt my life” was her mantra throughout.
And indeed, Elliott said, “She was able to keep up with her daily responsibilities and work full-time during treatment. She was even holding meetings from the hospital while receiving the stem cell transplant.”